Sins of the Father
by beauifulliketherain
Summary: Aurora's family love each other, but their relationships are...complicated


On the day of Aurora's coronation, Maleficent turns Diaval into his preferred form when he asks her, not even a sarcastic word. He is surprised, but not really, when she takes him to a very familiar clearing, and _grabs_ him carefully in her hands, making eye contact.

"So," she says, and Diaval always kind of thought that he'd die like this.

She smiles, suddenly.

"Diaval," she says, "On this spot I saved your life. On this spot you acknowledged your debt, and today (_Oh_) I acknowledge mine. You have saved me, more times than I'd care to count. You've repaid your debt, and really, silly bird, I think you already know what I'm trying to say."

The smile is full-blown laughter now, and there's a tap against his forehead, and she _throws_him upwards in an indignant squawking ball of feathers.

"Go on then." she says, squinting into the sun and it takes him a minute but he gets it. A moment of thought and he's human again, coming to stand in front of her, another kind of first meeting.

A heartbeat, then, and another and he leans forward and presses his lips to hers, gentle, before leaning back. There's an odd twist to her lips, but Maleficent is smiling and her eyes are warm. Diaval has worked with less than this.

"You sure you want to try this, silly bird? You'll be stuck with me a long time."

(Maleficent can be blind when she wants to be.)

"Want to go is see how our adopted daughter is doing?" he asks, and laughs and laughs and laughs.

Though later Maleficent will look back and realize the significance of the fact that she had at some point started turning her back to him without even _noticing_, at the time she doesn't realize her developing feelings for Diaval. She certainly wouldn't have kept him nearly so close, had she known.

(Another boy, equally dark-haired, flinging away an iron ring.)

As it is, she lets her guard down, secure in her feelings of petty exasperation and something that is certainly not fondness. She drops him from heights and changes his form without warning, watches him accustom himself to human limbs and teases him mercilessly.

(She listens to him as he tells her the smallest facts about Aurora, and hides her smile when he calls her 'hatchling' by mistake. She wonders whether he has any family who miss him, and once, memorably, calls him pretty bird without meaning to tease at all.)

Diaval does not fall for Maleficent so much as stumble down a downhill forest path, through twilit darkness and as inevitable as sunlight.

Loving her is a choice he keeps on making, through cold, cold, days when the stumps of her wings ache with an old, remembered pain, through the early weeks when she seemed as likely to hurt the child as to help her, and later when she would not _look_ at a toddling Aurora, even as she wove spell after spell of protection.

"Why is this one special to you?" he asks once, tired and frustrated. Some of his feathers have been plucked away.

Maleficent frowns and does not reply.

Children can be spiteful, mean things. Diaval knows, because birds are often targets for that spite. Even Aurora, who doesn't have a mean bone in her body, pulls at his feathers sometimes, even pulling a few off.

Diaval does not have any partiality to human children. He takes care of Aurora because Maleficent demands it, and only later comes to love her. Diaval knows firsthand how powerful Maleficent is, and how she'd been _hurting_.

So when all the history finally comes to light? There are more than a few hysterical moments when he wondered how he'd gotten the chance to grow to love Aurora at all.

As Aurora grows up, she is a child it would be almost impossible to dislike. She is kind and thoughtful, carefree without being careless, gentle and always polite.

There are days when Maleficent forgets about her guilt and her love for Aurora, and she _burnes_ with hatred. She does not talk to her and stays away and Diaval makes her excuses, whether she tells him to or not.

When a daughter is born to King Phillip and Queen Aurora on the eighth day of the eleventh month of the year, the Queen and her husband decide to name her Eliza.

The day of Eliza's birth doesn't have state significance before it became a princess' birthday. It has no magical importance other than also being the birthday of a minor fae elder, and whatever Maleficent attaches to it when she weaves her protective wards.

Aurora chooses her daughter's name because she'd always liked it, and thinks that it's a sweet name for a lovely girl. She confirms from her godmother that it doesn't have any magic attached to it. She holds out her daughter to be blessed by her godmother ("Godmother, are you _crying_?" "Quiet Beastie."), but the Queen does not ask for or receive any other magical gifts.

This is a child who would grow up surrounded by magic, unafraid of it, but her mother would not allow magic to touch her fate.

Diaval gets Eliza into trouble and out of it, and at least this time he's fairly sure about what babies can eat. There's always Auntie Maleficent to turn to for problems (really, Godmother, what else could she have called you, unless you'd prefer Grandma?), and the fae know the _best_ strawberry bushes and streams and puddles. Eliza goes flying with Maleficent and climbs trees to get back her new doll that Papa had just brought for her and Diaval _stole_ and there are reading and dancing lessons which she kind of likes, and riding and embroidery which she doesn't, because horses frighten the smaller fae and needlework is much too boring.

In her childhood, Aurora had been very rarely unhappy. She'd loved her shape shifting bird and her fairy godmother, and her severely misguided but ultimately well-meaning aunts with a child's uncomplicated love. Whatever tensions there'd been, she'd been too young to understand them.

Looking back though, so much had rested on a child's inborn gentleness and innocence. Too much. She'd always had responsibility, even when she hadn't known it.

Aurora was rarely unhappy, but looking at this at Eliza barefoot and mud-splattered (really that had been a _new_ dress and Diaval had to have been involved, probably hiding now) and laughing, this is something that perhaps she did not have. Eliza will be Queen someday, and to her people she is a smiling and kind but very proper princess. But what she does here _doesn't matter_. She can cover herself in mud and she can throw a tantrum and be tired or grumpy or mean, and she will be scolded or punished and then Maleficent will promise to teach or show her some new thing and Diaval will tease her into another harebrained scheme.

Aurora will look on, and feel a strange solidarity with her godmother, will understand again how love can be strong enough to break curses and move worlds.

The fate of kingdoms is not in her daughter's hands until she can handle it.

And that. Well. That is another kind of happiness


End file.
